A widow spent a cotton fortune on a cathedral for books. It is free, and it is the most beautiful room in Manchester.
John Rylands was Manchester’s first multi-millionaire, a cotton manufacturer of the plain nonconformist sort who did not much enjoy being rich. When he died in 1888 his widow Enriqueta Rylands — Cuban-born, sharp, and by then in control of one of the largest fortunes in England — decided to commemorate him with a library.
Not a wing of one. A library, built from nothing, on Deansgate, for the people of Manchester.
The building
Basil Champneys designed it and it took ten years, opening on 1 January 1900. It is late Victorian Gothic done with money and without hurry — sandstone from Cumbria, vaulting, a nave-like reading room with bays down each side.
It was electric from the day it opened, one of the first buildings in Manchester to be so, and Enriqueta had a filtered air system installed to keep the city’s soot off the books. Cotton money paying to keep out the consequences of cotton.
The statues at either end of the reading room are John Rylands and Enriqueta herself, facing each other down the length of it.
What is in it
Enriqueta did not just build the shell. She bought the Althorp library from Earl Spencer in 1892 — around 40,000 volumes, one of the great private collections in Europe — and then the Crawford manuscripts in 1901.
The result is a research collection of genuine international weight: papyri, Aldine and Caxton printings, medieval manuscripts, and the St John Fragment, a scrap of Greek papyrus roughly the size of a credit card that is generally dated to the first half of the second century and is usually described as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament.
It is on display. It is very small and rather unimpressive to look at, which is part of its charm.
Going
Entry is free. There are rotating exhibitions in the ground-floor gallery, a decent café in the modern extension, and a shop.
The contrast between the 1899 building and the 2007 entrance block is abrupt and deliberate. Go in through the new bit, then up the stone stairs into the old, which is the sequence the architects intended.
Photography is allowed without flash. It is one of the most photographed interiors in the north of England and it still does not look as good in a photograph as it does when you are standing in it.
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